Let me begin with a convincing insight on Instagram Marketing Strategy. This Social Network claimed to have grown its monthly business advertisers to 2 million in September 2017, which was limited to 1 million in March 2017. That is 100% increase in just 6 months.
Why did it Happen?
Everyone loves visual storytellers, especially when brands and businesses come out on screen and touch their passionate part of travel, fashion, motivation and alike, resulting in strong community bond, loyalty and engagement.
And, Instagram seems to be the ideal place to embrace the opportunity.
Now that you're here, you must be already knowing the power of Instagram and Instagram marketing, this blog post is dedicated to marketers, brands and businesses who need a clear understanding of how to build Instagram Marketing Strategy.
Instagram Marketing Strategy is broken down into 9 simple steps
- Why do businesses need Instagram Marketing Strategy?
- How to get started with Instagram Marketing Strategy?
- Get your Instagram for business account
- Statusbrew's Instagram Insights for mobile
- Optimizing your Instagram for business profile
- Types of Instagram content
- Instagram story
- Personalize your Instagram content style
- Takeaways
1. Why do Businesses need Instagram Marketing Strategy?
The only major reason to invest in Instagram Marketing should be the availability of your target audience on Instagram at first place, then followed by successful case studies and statistics rolled out by businesses and brands.
Instagram has a readily available audience base from an extensive range of demographics which makes it easier for many to understand their persona and build Instagram Marketing Strategy accordingly.
It's all about Instagram demographics which holds the most valuable user base of people under the age of 35, see the below stats from tracx.com:
2. How to get started with Instagram Marketing Strategy?
Basically, any marketing strategy begins by understanding one or two business goals, and Instagram Marketing Strategy is no different.
This would answer the WHY part of your business stepping into Instagram at first place.
Every marketer needs to figure this clear and transparent pipeline, your business goals are translated into marketing objectives, then strategized content strategy brings in the audience to achieve positive ROI.
If you want to have a general idea about Social Media Marketing Strategy from the scratch then you can have a look at this guide I have written.
For instance, I never visited Disneyland but their posts on Instagram make me crave for visiting one of their theme parks soon. Here, their Instagram marketing strategy is influencing my decision to choose them over their competitors.
The most common objectives of Instagram Marketing Strategy are as follows:
- Brand awareness
- Online community
- Drive engagement
- Drive traffic to website
- Announcing upcoming events
- Product and services
- Building bonds with influencers
3. Get your Instagram For Business account
In 2016, Instagram officially launched its business tools with an extensive range of features for customer interaction, Insights and promotion.
By enabling the profiles to stand out as businesses on Instagram, it is considered to be one of the smartest moves taken by Instagram for Social Media Marketers.
1. Instagram for Business profile
Considering that businesses already are obsessed with Facebook business pages and mining a lot out of it, Instagram opened the gates for them to create profiles with the help of already existing Facebook pages, in order to stand out as businesses on Instagram.
Benefits of having a business profile:
- Your followers can contact you with a single touch
- Your followers can know your business type
- Your followers can locate your business on maps
- You can identify your audience with the help of insights
2. Instagram Insights
Without measuring the right numbers, your business can drown into the obvious mistakes on Instagram.
With a business profile, you can structure your content strategy with metrics that define the success of your goal. Understanding your audience demographics and performance of your posts can lead you to the positive ROI.
I have written an extensive guide on Social Media Metrics and Social Media ROI that might help your business work strategically.
List of post and audience metrics that can you access as a business-
- Impressions
- Reach
- Profile views
- Website clicks
- Email click
- Gender
- Age range
- Top locations
- Audience most active time
You can even have the access to in-depth metrics related to a particular post about its performance and audience reaction towards it.
4. Statusbrew's Instagram Insights for mobile
There's no doubt that businesses are enjoying the insights provided by Instagram for business, and to help businesses get even more strategic, we at Statusbrew introduced Instagram Insights for mobile -- which gained a lot traction from our users.
We designed an Insight model that allows anyone to analyze the audience behavior corresponding to posted media. For every business out there, the ultimate goal is to translate the content effort into business values. WE MADE IT HANDY FOR YOU!
To know more about how Statusbrew's Instagram Insights for mobile can grow your business. Read the below article.
Feature Focus: Instagram Insights For Mobile
Promote on Instagram
Your well-performing posts can be turned into ads in the simplest way using your business profile on Instagram.
Getting ahead with three simple steps — pick the post, select your target audience and promote it.
That’s it.
5. Optimize your Instagram Profile Picture, Bio and Website link
It’s the right time to audit your business profile if you already have one.
Your identity lies here on Instagram, there’s a dedicated place for Profile picture, username, website link and most importantly, your Bio of 150 characters (you can be short and precise too). Further information includes your profile’s category and contact options.
Anyone visiting your profile is going to judge whether or not you’re relevant to them. You have to show who you are as a business and what you do in order to make people click that FOLLOW button.
Your Bio can even enhance the way you portray your beliefs, giving it a more personalized touch.Taking the examples of established brands and businesses, we can strongly see their profiles are directed towards providing value to their followers.
6. Frame your Instagram content strategy
Instagram is the right place to test your creativity to its best. Around 95 million photos are uploaded every day and they get around 4.5 billion likes too. Brands and businesses cannot afford to miss preparing a content strategy on Instagram befitting their business goals and marketing objectives.
Since the beginning of the past decade, content marketing on the internet has been taking a whole new attire among content marketers and gradually enhancing after the launch of Instagram.
The power of visuals is here — how good are you in making photo, videos and GIFS?
Instagram can be the best place for your business to tell visual stories, and it takes hard work and time.
Your visuals should please the eyes of your audience, as it should educate, provide information and add value.
Let’s get ahead with the types of engaging content that you can post for enhancing your Instagram Marketing Strategy:
Behind-the-scenes post
Showing people the real collaboration of your team and fun behind the screen can enhance the content value. At Statusbrew, we believed in the Japanese discipline to be inculcated in our work culture, this was the post we published 31 months ago. It's one of the strategies to build brand awareness and drive engagement.
Product updates
Instagram is an ideal spot to portray your final product beautifully to your audience. It takes a lot of time building something with the right intention of helping people, it has to rule the screens of your audience.
Imagine a hot sunny day you are walking down the street surfing your Instagram feeds and you come across Magnum's Instagram posts.
Company culture
Your workplace is more than just work. In order to increase the productivity, your team needs a refreshment in one of those summer afternoons. It's fine to notify your audience about that.
In fact, according to Deloitte’s 2016 Global Human Capital Trends survey, 82% of respondents said they believe culture is a potential competitive advantage.
User-generated content
Ask your audience and brand users to share content about your brand on social. Use their passion as a point of departure to increase engagement, start a conversation around your brand, and in so doing, create a stronger customer community.
93% of consumers find user-generated content to be helpful when making a purchasing decision, as it comes from real people.
Aerie has been implementing this content technique into their Instagram marketing strategy of getting their brand fans, resulting in higher engagement and loyalty.
Quotes
Your posts on Instagram should be diversified with motivation for your audience and there's no better way than posting quotes. Quotes are proven to give your brand a new gesture of positivity among your audience.
7. Instagram stories
A report on TechCrunch found that Snapchat Stories view counts drowned by 15-40 percent after Instagram Stories launched in August 2016, and posting amount dropped as well. Meanwhile, Instagram view counts escalated, and most influencers have seen engagement rates that are 3-5x higher on Instagram than on Snapchat.
Within six months, Instagram Stories hit 150 million daily users, which is only slightly less than the number of daily active users for Snapchat’s entire app. In early April, Facebook announced that Instagram Stories had reached 200 million daily active users (DAUs) and the media quickly piped to say that Instagram had "officially crushed Snapchat" and Snapchat was “dead.” explained in this manner on Forbes.com.
For an in-depth understanding of the features on Instagram stories, look at this blog post published by Hubspot.
List of Instagram story features-
- Live
- Normal
- Boomerang
- Superzoom
- Rewind
- Stop motion
- Hands-Free
Instagram appears at the top of the feeds of your users, which means it’s more likely to reach more audience via story than normal posts.
This morning I came across an Instagram story of IBM promoting their 25 years of successful patent leadership. The first 9 slides gave me an overview throughout the journey as I was moving from one slide to other, their CTA was placed on the last and 10th slide of the story with a link to IBM Research website where I was able to access the entire information.
This is one of the many examples of how brands expose themselves with the help of Instagram story feature.
There’s an extensive use of this feature and can be utilized to fulfill any of your marketing objectives.
Instagram story has 250 million daily active users and they-
- Promote their content
- Show behind-the-scenes
- Host Instagram takeovers
- Release an offer or promotion
- Contests and giveaways
- Celebrate festivals
- Give Shoutouts
- And this list can go on forever as there’s no limit to creativity
One evening we came up with our Instagram story on Statusbrew's profile where our video production manager, Daniel Travitzky had to entertain our audience with his humorous nature showing how cool the end of the year holiday was for us. We use #lifeatstatusbrew to illuminate our company culture.
But still, Instagram is extremely huge with 800 million monthly active users and occupying the top spot on your audience' news feed page can be a bit psychological. Daniel has made a video explaining the Instagram algorithm of sorting posts and you should definitely have a look at it.
8. Personalize your Instagram content style
Every successful profile on Instagram is beautiful and appealing in their own way, and Social Media Marketing Strategy is always about the personal consistency that gives your brand an identity online. Instagram should be considered a bit stronger than other Social networks in this aspect.
Your own style of colors, fonts, images, captions and hashtags can build a unique arcade for your Instagram Marketing Strategy for which you will be known for by your audience.
@neil_a_stevens is one of the designers on Instagram who was featured by Hubspot's blog post on Design inspiration and further he was stated as,
Neil A. Stevens specializes in poster design, and he's particularly good at creating sharp, dynamic pieces. He's created posters for many cities and countries around the globe, including a handful for the Tour de France.
When your creativity stands out on Instagram, you stand out as well.
What is the right time to post on Instagram?
Imagine the amount of energy consumed to create engaging content for Instagram and how would you actually feel when they go unnoticed?
I am in love with the folks at Coschedule, they made an extensive study on Social Media and came with a proper strategy for posting time for all the Social networks, which is being recommended by Buffer, Hootsuite andHubspot.
Find the Instagram part of their entire Infographic below-
Automate your Instagram publishing with Statusbrew publish feature
9. Takeaways
1. [A Guide To Create And Optimize Content On Instagram For Business](/create-optimize-content-instagram-for-business) 2. [How To Become An Influencer On Instagram, 10 Simple Steps!](/become-instagram-influencer-legit-way) 3. [How Businesses Can Make Use Of Instagram Stories](/businesses-make-use-instagram-stories)Eager to know from you
Like every other practice, Instagram is all about experiencing the various possibilities online. You will identify the quality of your posts and engagement with time will take the positive side of the graph.
What other tactics do you apply to your Instagram Marketing Strategy for your personal and business profile? I would love to discuss more in the comments section below.
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